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The Thief, His Wife and The Canoe

The four part drama for ITV sounds like something straight from a film script, but it is based on the very real life scandal surrounding John Darwin AKA ‘Canoe Man’. It tells the story of a man who faked his own death after going out on his canoe close to his home in Seaton Carew on the North East coast. It was not a tragic accident as John and his wife made it out to be, but a plot cooked up after they racked up debts of £64,000.

Astounding as it may seem, Anne went to great lengths to hide the truth. She even lied to their sons, Mark and Anthony. For five years whilst her husband, in the early days of the fraud, secretly lived in a bedsit next door to their home. After half a decade of deceiving police, friends and their own flesh and blood, John and Anne decided to move to Panama, only for their shocking secret to exposed by the unearthing of a now infamous photo of them posing in a Panama real estate office in July 2006. Nervous that his cover was blown, John turned up a police station in London, telling officers he thought he ‘was a missing person.’

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